Joanna Valente’s debut collection of poetry, Sirs and Madams (Aldrich Press, 2014), is a study in human relationships among different kinds of kin — speakers, strangers, and family members both living and dead — that fleshes itself out through an extended homage to sisterhood. Three sisters’ voices overlap and interweave throughout this text; by turns, they dominate each other, themselves, and this collection, but never quite the world around them. These women, and the poems themselves, are defined largely by their positioning among one another. The voices of Tessa, Maggie, and Marianne, shaped by the experiences and fixations that preoccupy them, begin to glean identity from the light the other poems cast around them, as much as from the language and the soul that constructs each of them as separate identities. And yet, despite all the togetherness, there is a profound sensibility of isolation in these poems. The sisters’ voices [...]
Fox Frazier-Foley
Cult Statue of a Goddess (found poem, Getty Museum) 1. Its provenance based on what we might term “forensic evidence”? Briefly surveying in as neutral a manner as possible the bravura display of wind-blown drapery over generous forms of her body, illicit excavations in several archaeological zones, I would also like to welcome the observers at today’s event: Persephone not wearing a chiton and himation but rather a peplos, the enthroned Zeus lacking any indication of characteristic décolletage, possibly Aphrodite, Demeter, or Hera armed with a magic belt of leather or fabric purchased from a “supermarket magnate.” One need only think of the systematic looting in what was ancient Morgantina, near the modern town of echinoid fragments, the true right-arm socket “skeletonized” by dissolution, stored in a glass vial, stored in boxes in the basement, all in style. 2. (unknown to anyone else in his family) Good morning and welcome [...]
excerpts from your secret diary that is now mine i fantasize about strapping my boyfriend to the top of my car. it gets really exciting when he starts screaming and the winds are too high to hear him. i drive until the sun goes down so far we can’t see the hills because i mowed them down with my big wheels. and i am laughing. he will stop screaming when i stop laughing because i have created a great hollow in the earth. a grand canyon, really. just for him. he is unstrapped he looks in my eyes i throw him in the pit. we have rough sex he says i love you here is a gold star. The Nine Circles of Ikea she climbs the curious escalator to the basso loco up and up to 1. Kitchen utensils. hanging from the fruit-flavored walls is the ripe Betty Crocker. she [...]
In Caitlin Thomson’s Incident Reports (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2014), the moon no longer appears in a post-apocalyptic night sky. Neither do the stars for that matter, but no one is counting these missing “bright holes” when loved ones have been “summoned” or go missing. The theme of absence dominates the first half of the book. In the surprising and specific “Other Lovers’ Letters,” Thomson illustrates even in times of catastrophe and devastation, we navigate relationships and observe minutia. “Dear Alexander, a reminder to turn the stove off should not be necessary.” “Katrina, we have talked for some time now about light and I must say that I find the flicker of you appealing.” Dear Jasper, teasing a sleeping girl is not advised.” Initially, there is a fear of madness, a flurry of locking doors, no discourse, as people begin to disappear. Birds, (and their songs, as Thomson points out) are [...]
Bird, by Saumya Arya Haas, 2015. Ink and paper.
Saumya Arya Haas is an ALB candidate in Religious Studies at Harvard University. She lives with challenges due to a Traumatic Brain Injury. Prior to this life-altering injury, she engaged in interfaith/intergroup dialogue and Social Justice projects, advising organizations such as and , and has worked with the Parliament of World Religions, The UN World Council of Religious Leaders, and The UN Peace Initiative. Her work has taken her everywhere from West Africa to the White House. She is a regular contributor at , , and . Her writing can also be found on various other websites and in print media. Saumya is a priestess of both Hinduism and Vodou. Fox: Thanks so much for coming to talk with us about your love of art and your writing life. I know you’ve published a lot of writing — on religion, on culture, and journalistic pieces — but you mentioned to [...]
Bangles Sometimes they annoy me and I say I’m going to take them off for good. I remember the night when the bangle-seller eased them on: Bright and clattering, red and gold, spangly with glitter. For weeks afterwards, small shimmers appear On my clothes, my face, my husband’s blonde hair. The gentle glitterbomb of Love and India. I remember my regular bangle-seller, Rotund and genial, Telling me (I was 14) that if a man ever grabs me And I cannot get away, To slam my wrist against his eyes. This surprises me: They are glass, these bangles, decorative and fragile-seeming Pretty, useless. But he tells me that adornment never only serves one purpose. These shining rings are blinding In more than one way. One at a time, they are delicate things. I wear 30 on each arm. And when a man grabs me and I cannot get away I smash [...]
The Infoxicated Corner and its regulars love few things in life more than a good arts party (a good arts party, I said). For this reason, I wanted to let all my nearest & dearest Northeastern friends know (if they didn’t already) about the really fun time that’s about to go down in Pittsburgh, PA, this January 31st. Filmmaker Rachael Deacon and Poet-Editrix Margaret Bashaar have created an annual event, titled FREE _____ POEMS ABOUT _____. What fills in those blanks changes every year: last year’s event was FREE SNAKE POEMS ABOUT SNAKES, and this year’s is FREE MONSTER POEMS ABOUT MONSTERS. Here’s what makes it cool: it’s a party for the people. Really. It’s a completely DIY, no-budget event. When they say it’s free, they mean just that. Performers, writers, artists, and other vendors contribute time and work in order to create a festive gathering that brings together artists [...]
A Labor and a Language of Love (or, What Are You Gonna Do with that Humanities PhD?) Once upon a time, before I was a nurse and a student midwife, I went to graduate school with a very different goal in mind: a PhD in English. Fresh out of undergrad, with vague ideas about feminism and about changing the world, a love of books, and precious few ideas about what I could do with my degree, I left the city in which I’d spent my entire life and moved to California to become an academic. Many things changed while I was in grad school– I met new people and lost touch with others, I got married, I had two daughters– but others remained the same– I still considered myself a book-loving feminist, and I still wanted to change the world. And by the time I was in the dissertation phase, [...]
It’s the very last day of 2014, and I wanted to post one more installment of TheThe Infoxicated Corner before we take off a few (more) weeks, and I catch y’all again a bit later into the New Year. I can’t believe Infoxicated went live at the beginning of September: the past few months have flown by, and yet I have the feeling that we’ve gone some crazy places together through all the absolutely stunning contributions people have shared with us. I feel very blessed to have brought y’all this amazing stuff, and really grateful to the other TheThe crew, who invited me and and gave me my own little corner. (How sad would it be if I didn’t have this platform, and this embarrassment of aesthetic/creative riches had been kept to my quiet little niche of SoCal?) And I’m really pleased — no, I think a better word might [...]
There are few poets in America who generate as much excitement among poets and critics alike as Dorothea Lasky. Her radically straightforward diction and deadpan delivery have generated some of the most talked about collections in recent American poetry: Awe (2007), Black Life (2010) and Thunderbird (2012), all from indie super-presence Wave Books. In her most recent collection, Rome, her first with the revived (and storied) Norton imprint Liveright, Lasky pushes her now-recognizable voice into a desperately new register, and the direction is incredibly promising. Though these poems at time spin their wheels to little effect (or affect), there are as many or more moments when their witchy self-talk seems to break through its own artifice, establishing contact with something entirely other. “Is it true that all trees are the same All houses are the same Is it true that all people are the same We eat from the same [...]
Anyone with decent vision can spot the differences in the two photographs below, but to fully appreciate each incarnation of this house as a work of art, you must first know something about . The Heidelberg Project was started by Tyree Guyton, with his grandfather, Sam Mackey, in Detroit, Michigan, in 1986. They started The Heidelberg Project in the McDougall-Hunt neighborhood, on the east side of Detroit, on Heidelberg Street. Tyree had come back home from serving in the military, and was shocked and saddened to see that his old neighborhood had begun to deteriorate. Crime rates were high, and community morale was low. Tyree embarked on an optimistic, tenacious, ultimately very successful project to transform his neighborhood to an indoor-and-outdoor art museum, maintained not just by artists but also by the community. He started by painting a series of houses on the street that had fallen into disrepair — [...]
Drought Every day ripe corn lingers in the field unpicked: silk, more brittle in the sun husk, papery from the heat cob, like bone—no rain on the horizon— rows of kernels puckering, until the corn prays for even earworms and flea beetles to come, lest it fall back to the dirt untasted Yield You are buckled in, strapped down, belt tensioned across your hips, crossed taut from your shoulder— doors locked & rumbling as the car rolls, skids, slides across the blacktop— the graceless ballet of a car crash tearing up squares of sod with shredded tires the vicious perfume of oil & burnt rubber from tires, safety brakes locked & useless— somersaults in nearly perfect arcs, punctuated by the squeal & shriek of bending metal finally just the hiss, rattling like a gentleman snake, you come to a full stop, softer than you’d braced for: then, just the quiet [...]
Repeating the Alarm …when he sings he has the most wonderful voice. —Hillary Cook, dentist The neighbor’s house is an empire and the empire is shut tight tonight. And all the lights are off in the empire and all the doors are locked keeping everything imperial inside, where it leans toward the window unseen. The monkeys scream in the trees, green vervet complete their circle of noise in the leaves. Leaves shake down and they stay in the trees. The boy’s dark skin is worn white at the knees. The empire has him tied to a bed. Teeth cracked from bark and bone, tough love, the sinewed arms. A light coat of fur covers his chest and his back. The boy cannot eat stew or any cooked food. Yet he fingers fork tines, fingers a spoon. The boy cannot stand upright without the help of a chair or the stump [...]
In Kristy Bowen’s dream-like, three-part jewel, The Shared Properties of Water and Stars (, 2014), Bowen describes her own work as a “strange little fairy tale.” Broken up into three parts, the poems radiate a murky symbolism that is mysterious and sexualized, echoing and promising violence: women carry boxes of sadness, lace drags on the ground, sometimes the lace is blood-stained. Hundreds of bears lumber and low softly outside the windows. There is also mystery — a forest, ghosts who carry tangerines. Elegant descriptions and short sentences propel the reader down a surreal, prose-poetic rabbit hole: “There are three houses in three different colors. Each owner keeps a certain kind of sadness locked in the cupboard. The tall man lives in the white house. The short man keeps rabbits as pets…The woman in the second house keeps her sadness in a smallish box…The girl with the blonde hair lives next [...]
Mary Tewksbury is a whiskey-swiggin’, bluegrass-pickin’ singer-songwriter from upstate New York, who frequently performs solo, as well as with the band Next to Kin. She got this tattoo to carry with her a representation of “strong and beautiful women taking a hold of life.” For Tewks, this concept is bound up with her love of music. She chose the spot for her ink — her right upper arm — based upon the old idea that the right side of the body conveys a public image to the world (when having one’s palms read, for example, the right palm frequently suggests what personal traits one is comfortable displaying as a public image, or the identity you want to project to people around you). “This is the comfortable side of me,” she explains. “Music is my truest passion in lfe.” Her tattoo artist, , has spent the past several years working at [...]